The more we surrender, the more we are granted.

Express Yourself

This is how to speak from the heart. I am teaching myself. I am learning. I often work with ideas as I write and I feel physically oriented in my head, but right now, as I type this, I am focusing attention on the centre of my chest, allowing myself to feel whatever is there. I am not trying to create anything. I am just speaking. The song ‘Express Yourself’ comes to mind. To mind? To heart? Where is it that ideas arrive? Where do they come from? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Not now. I may end up chasing my tail. And even just there, I caught myself up in my head, feeling myself there physically again. I have recalibrated. Holding strong in the expansive heart-centre. Mmmmm….that feels right.

So why do we spend so much time in our heads? I feel it is because so much of our sensory information is processed there. Or that seems to be the major locus of so much sensory input, at least. The eyes are wired to the brain, and the ears are right there, too. The nose is in the same neighbourhood. The tongue, too. Right off the bat, that’s four out of five senses all located around the head. It’s no surprise that so many of us have become so tied up in our minds. But where is the mind? The Pixies asked us this. A valuable question. Where is my mind? Why do so many of us assume it is in the brain? What proof do we have? We can feel sensations all over our bodies, and within our bodies, too. I’ve been doing it a lot more, lately. I find it a welcome relief, a sort of recalibration, after so many years of residing in my head.

Since my diet shifted away from much of the junk I once put in it, I am able to feel the inner activities of my body with much more clarity and awareness. It’s something else. I highly recommend it. I can feel my body balancing itself, healing itself. I can feel things moving around in here, and I know intuitively that it is doing what it needs to do. I can stay out of the way and let it do its work.

I haven’t been consciously growing my hair or fingernails, nor can I claim credit for my digestion, but it all happens. The intelligence of life seems to have these things figured out. Where do we draw the line, deciding what processes we control, and what has been automated? Is it all just a continuum of learning and assimilating various lessons and subsequent functions? Who knows?

But I am just rambling. I guess I should feel free to do so on a blog. I am expressing myself, and I have been listening to this song on repeat since I mentioned it earlier. (Check it out here.) I highly recommend it. And feel your heart while you’re at it. I feel that if we all made a habit of this, feeling our hearts as we lived life, things would naturally iron themselves out. Life can simplify itself – maybe the best we can do is let it.

That’s it for the moment. I am off to New York with my brother now, to celebrate the New Year with Neil Young at Carnegie Hall – an awesome Christmas present from our folks. I trust we will have a great time there, a first visit for both of us. And as this Christmas season winds down, I hope that we can all enjoy the epiphany upon us, the simple epiphany within us, and learn to appreciate the peace in our hearts, and to express ourselves freely and fearlessly.